Do Minimum Wage Hikes Hurt Job Growth?

Danny Vinik: “Between 2011 and June 30 of this year, more than a dozen states increased their minimum wages. This has offered economists an opportunity to examine whether those minimum wage hikes have reduced employment. The results are promising.”

“Saul D. Hoffman and Wai-Kit Shum, two economists at the University of Delaware, have now offered a more comprehensive look at the employment effects of state-level minimum wage increases. The authors examined employment effects of the 13 states that increased their minimum wages since 2011 … They focused on two specific groups: teenagers not in college and adults without a high-school diploma groups most likely to see negative job growth from a minimum wage hike.”

“Hoffman and Shum found that employment growth among teens not in college and adults without a high school diploma was stronger in states that increased their minimum wages than those that didn’t.”

“The researchers got creative and compared employment growth among teens not in college with males aged 30-49 with at least some college education … In states that increased their minimum wages, employment for the teen sample grew by 2.32 percentage points compared with 1.1 percentage points for the adult sample. In other words, job growth was 1.22 percentage points stronger for these less-skilled workers.”

“It’s not the perfect conditions for this research, but it’s pretty good. So far, the results support the Democrats’ position.”

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It’s because Democrats, much more often than Republicans, base their economic policies on what is proven to bring the greatest good to the greatest number, instead of peddling a steady stream of economic myths to serve the 1%.

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Every time you see a headline proposing a question, you can assume the answer is “no”.